I think it would be useful to keep "crossfading" and "gapless" playback as distinct concepts. I think they're both useful features, and as judged by the response to this thread, potentially two of the most sought-after additions to the empeg player. (That and some better genre-based searching/playing capabilities).

One thing that's obvious is that the musical taste of the listener plays a lot into the interpretation of this feature. The folks amongst us (myself included) that enjoy seamlessly mixed music need a feature that is truly (or as best as current technology--such as some of the gapless or crossfading plugins for winamp--can produce) gapless. meaning no audible gap whatsoever. Folks that are not fans of the genre may not appreciate the difference between a minute, but audible gap, and NO gap -- or OVERLAP -- whatsoever. An overlap of a split second can be just as bad, because you lose the beat. The music in this genre actually has one song seamlessly blending into another, and the tracking that breaks the songs up into separate mp3 files is really an artifact of wanting to be able to skip around occasionally. otherwise we would just leave them as one long song.

I'm sorry to go so overboard on the description... but sometimes I get worried that people do not quite appreciate the distinctions--and it would really suck to have folks do a lot of work on this and end up w/ something short of the mark for a lot of us. Crossfading in a pop-dance club generally
is a less precise (though not necessarily easier) maneuver where the point that one song ends and another begins are not nessecarily matched precisely on the beat. Again, not looking for beatmatching... because the beats have already been matched by the DJ that recorded the album... i'm just looking for zero gap between the tracks that are already there.

BTW, has it been established whether anyone on the empeg staff is a big fan of house/trance music? It would certainly help if we had a mole on the inside....

Dan

NOT GAPLESS PLAYBACK --> "Generally, when someone around here says "crossfading" we just mean buffering up the 2nd song with maybe 10 or 15 seconds left in the 1st song and, at an appropriate time (possibly when one track begins to fade on its own, possibly at a user-defined time like 5 seconds from the track's end, etc) the first track will fade out and the second one will to fade in. "